It's not often that trumpeter John Wallace is outdone for sheer musical power. But in Trumpets! - a celebration of the instrument and its ancestors that he curated for the London Sinfonietta - he came off second best in a musical showdown between western classical instruments and the traditional ones of Uzbekistan.
At the heart of Uzbek music is the karnay, an ancient and beautiful brass instrument made from a gleaming tube of copper that produces sounds of rich but brutal force. Capable of everything from piercing high notes to earth-shattering grunts and groans, the calls of the karnay have an apocalyptic power. As Wallace suggested, it was possible to imagine how Jericho might have fallen to a phalanx of massed karnay players. And the Queen Elizabeth Hall just about survived their sonic onslaught.
Lined up against the three karnay players of Abbos, a group of Uzbek virtuosos, Wallace and other members of the London Sinfonietta were overwhelmed by their music. This improvisatory collaboration was part of Peter Wiegold's The Great Heel, a set of compositions using the members of Abbos alongside the Sinfonietta. With a mixture of musical styles, encompassing Uzbek melodies and jazzy modernism, the pieces created a teeming diversity. But the Abbos musicians were best revealed in a pre-concert event in which they played their own music, with its dizzyingly complex rhythmic construction and subtle, microtonal tuning.
After hearing the karnay and its music, the rest of the brass repertoire is liable to sound hopelessly effete. However, Gabrieli's Canzon in echo duodecimi toni, performed by the Royal Scottish Academy Brass, had an elemental power of its own, as florid melodies were passed from one soloist to another.
Stuart MacRae's new trumpet concerto, Interact, performed by John Wallace with the Sinfonietta conducted by HK Gruber, reinvents this antiphony for the present day: at the climax of the first movement, the ensemble is surrounded by four brass players, who create a corona of musical calls. For all the energy of the first movement, and the virtuosity of the solo part, the music progresses like a sequence of tableaux, each more unpredictable than the last.
The second, slower movement, is even more elusive, and MacRae organises his sounds as if they were blocks of physical material, from a static ground of string chords to an eruptive, jazzy duo for solo trumpet and piano. And yet the piece is somehow more than the sum of its parts, as each fragment of material creates a chain of relationships with the music around it: a study in musical and emotional interaction.
